Monday, February 13, 2012

Skynet - It's all about the children apparently

"Public Safety Minister Vic ["Torture Lite"] Toews said the law will give the tools to police to adequately deal with 21st-century technology, and said anyone opposing the laws favours "the rights of child pornographers and organized crime ahead of the rights of law abiding citizens."

Actually, Vic, we do favour the rights of child pornographers. And organized crime. We have to if we favour the rights of everyone equally - which, if I recall correctly, is a bedrock conservative value.

The U.S. government is seeking software that can mine social media to predict everything from future terrorist attacks to foreign uprisings, according to requests posted online by federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies.

In a formal "request for information" from potential contractors, the FBI recently outlined its desire for a digital tool to scan the entire universe of social media - more data than humans could ever crunch.

The system sought by the research arm of the national intelligence director's office would fuse together everything from Web searches to Wikipedia edits to traffic webcams.

It's not just your realtime warrantless online history that you have to be worried about, but your warrantless offline vehicle history too. The RCMP have a pilot project in BC to monitor and track vehicles' licence plates automatically.

Originally sold as being just for finding stolen vehicles, the project expanded to retaining data for people on its "hit" list (on parole, on probation, ever been linked to someone under investigation, etc) for two years or more. The plan is to expand even further, and to retain even non-hit data for a year.

If these online & offline police state measures pass, the government, or even just a single corrupt person within the government, would have warrantless access to anything a person might say or read online. Then even if an individual is smart enough to avoid liking the wrong facebook page, they'll still get found out when their vehicle is recorded parked next to one belonging to a trade-unionist/libertarian/journalist/whoever.

Part of what protects people from oppression is that it's simply uneconomical to have a secret police force physically go out and surveil everyone. These new tools plus some datamining software will make that kind of mass surveillance trivial and fairly cheap.

"If you can make this about being here to protect your children, if you can engender that kind of fear on the part of the public, who is going to object to that? Inceasingly, this government is engaging in privacy theatre. When the public is scared, they’re willing to allow for the erosion of their freedoms because they want to feel safe."

Controlling the inter-net is just a scam, to control all information, that goes out to the public.

Harper already controls the media. He hates being exposed on the inter-net.

So, Canadians don't really have, freedom of speech. Our Democracy is in tatters. Our Civil Rights and Liberties, are being taken away from us. Harper is no Conservative, he is a Reformer, from his Northern Foundation Party, of 1989. So to Harper, control is an absolute must, as it is to all dictators.